Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave are to star together on the London stage for the first time.

The Oscar-winning actress will play Fiennes’s mother Queen Margaret in Richard III, with Fiennes taking the title role.

This column revealed last spring that Fiennes would play the psychologically challenged monarch at the Almeida Theatre.

Ralph Fiennes, pictured left, and Vanessa Redgrave, right, will star together in Richard III in London in June

Rupert Goold, the Almeida’s artistic chief, will direct the play when rehearsals start in late April.

Last night, the Almeida confirmed that the play’s first preview will be June 6 with an official opening night on June 14.

It’s not the first time Miss Redgrave, one of our greatest actresses, has played Fiennes’s mother.

She appeared in Coriolanus, Fiennes’ film directorial debut, as the warrior general’s battle-ready mother Volumnia, and dominated every scene she was in.

It was a beauty of a performance.

Keen fans of the Bard will know that Joely Richardson, Miss Redgrave’s daughter, played the role of Margaret in Trevor Nunn’s production of War Of The Roses at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, Surrey, late last year.

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Fiennes goes directly into Richard III after his powerful portrait of the tragic architect in The Master Builder at the Old Vic.

He also turns in an astutely comic performance in the new Coen brothers film Hail, Caesar!, which opens today.

Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible often reflects the times we live in.

The new production of Miller’s powerful drama about the Salem witch trials, with Ben Whishaw, Sophie Okonedo, Ciaran Hinds, Saoirse Ronan and Jenny Jules, perfectly mirrors the era of Donald Trump, who has turned the American primaries into the most riveting of dramas.

‘It’s about Trump,’ Scott Rudin, The Crucible’s producer told me after its first preview on Tuesday night.

Saoirse Ronan, left, pictured with Ben Whishaw in the new production of The Crucible

‘It’s about the power of fear,’ Rudin added, noting the billionaire mogul’s wall-to-wall fear-mongering — with talk of banning Muslims and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.

It opens at the end of the month — when we may know if Trump will be the Republican party’s choice in the race for the White House against (I presume) Hillary Clinton.

It’ll be a bruising battle.

Cynthia glories in her purple patch

When Cynthia Erivo played the heroine of The Color Purple in London, her performance was contained within the small Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark.

Now she’s on Broadway, Erivo has been unleashed.

Her voice fills the 1,078-seat Bernard B.Jacobs Theatre — and at one point in the second act she literally stops the show as the audience rises as one and explodes into applause.

Both her performance as Celie and the show — based on Alice Walker’s best-selling novel about how an abused black woman rose above her horrendous ill treatment at the hands of men in her life — have grown a lot richer since the Chocolate Factory run, and since I saw The Color Purple in previews in New York in November.

‘We have gone deeper,’ Erivo told me when I saw her backstage in her dressing room on Wednesday night.

Cynthia Erivo, making waves on Broadway with The Colour Purple, poses with her personalised cushions

She was also being visited by Edward Kemp and Nona Shepphard, respectively the director and associate director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Erivo studied.

It was Kemp who used the word ‘unleashed’ and also said he was impressed by how her performance had a passion that commanded the audience’s attention.

The show, directed by John Doyle (whom I spotted at the back of the stalls checking all was well), also stars Jennifer Hudson and Danielle Brooks (best known for the Orange Is The New Black TV show).

Erivo rested after a performance on personalised cushions given to her by Hudson, as my picture shows.

The actress is likely to feature in the Tony Awards in June, when she’ll be a major contender for the best actress in a musical trophy.

Sad not to be in the country to bid the fondest farewell to the musical Bend It Like Beckham (after the Oscars, I’m now in New York).